Pregnancy & Birth

Recommended Books and Films About Childbearing

A note from author Jane Pincus:

As a co-founder of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective and co-author of Our Bodies, Ourselves through all its incarnations, I’ve worked to help make childbearing more woman and family centered. I’ve been lucky to be able to write the following book and film reviews for the journal Birth: Issues in Perinatal Care, edited by Diony Young*. The publisher has been kind enough to let us post them here.**  I hope they will be useful. 

• Review of Lady’s Hands, Lion’s Heart: A Midwife’s Saga by Carol Leonard 
  
  
• Review of The Birth Partner: A Complete Guide to Childbirth for Dads, Doulas, and All Other Labor Companions by Penny Simkin
  
  
• Review of Evidence-Based Care for Normal Labour and Birth: A Guide for Midwives by Dennis Walsh
  
  
• Review of Caesarean: Just Another Way of Birth? by Rosemary Mander
  
  
• Review of Born in the U.S.A.: How a Broken Maternity System Must Be Fixed to Put Women and Children First by Marsden Wagner
  
  
• Review of Birth Crisis by Sheila Kitzinger
  
  
• Review of The Official Lamaze Guide: Giving Birth With Confidence by Judith Lothian and Charlotte DeVries
  
  
• Review of The Medical Delivery Business: Health Reform, Childbirth, and the Economic Order by Barbara Bridgman Perkins
  

• Orgasmic Birth a film by Debra Pascali-Bonaro
  
  
• Laboring Under An Illusion: Mass Media Childbirth vs. The Real Thing a film by Vicki Elson

You can also read an earlier article I wrote that discusses pregnancy and birth books. While some of the books listed are no longer in print, the article contains a brief history of childbearing and discusses a way of looking at books which I believe is still useful today.

* Birth has drawn an invaluable portrait of national and international childbirth concerns over the past 35 years. Its editorials, studies, media reviews, news briefs and critical comments continue to provide a huge amount of information for practitioners, health researchers, childbirth teachers and activists, and laypeople. You can find information about subscribing to the journal on the Wiley-Blackwell website.

** The reviews are posted as .pdf files, which means that you need to have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on your computer in order to see them.  You can download Adobe Acrobat Reader for free by clicking here.

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